Finding Your Voice

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The core of writing, the moment you find yourself as a writer is when you find your voice. There's no good writer in the world who doesn't have an immediately distinctive voice on the page that we recognize the moment we open the book. Every essay I write with one simple monosyllabic sentence because it lands the whole thing which can be very elaborate and broken,. multi-syllabic. It's like a drop shot in tennis, right? You just a booth. That tension and dialogue between the pursuit of perfection and the deliberate introduction of artful imperfection, that's what makes craft into art.

A few years ago, Adam Gopnik, a longtime writer for The New Yorker and three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, started thinking about all the things he wasn't good at. He couldn't dance the foxtrot or bake a brioche. Well into his 50s, he still had no idea how to drive a car. To make matters worse, when he looked around, he saw people who could do these things — often with great skill. How, he wondered, did they do it? How do any of us get good at the things we're good at? And how do some of us become next-level masters? To answer those questions, Adam set out to master the skills he lacked, and he has written up the results in a profound little book, "The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery."